Posted by Techie on January 04, 19100 at 20:53:52:
What is love?
How do you know when you love someone?
Is there such a thing as being in love with a person that doesn’t realize your in love with them?
When I was a boy growing up, I remember asking these questions. I remember also that no one seemed to have a very good answer.
Oh sure, they had answers. They told me that these questions were what songs, and poems were written about, and told me to listen to songs and read poems. Sometimes I would find love described in stories and plays, such as “Romeo and Juliet”. Of course, while songs and poems and stories talked about being in love, experiencing the tragedy and heartbreak, the joy and happiness, nothing ever really prepares you for the brutal experience of falling unconditionally, totally, brutally, in love.
Today, I know what love is. I know how it feels, I know what it tastes like.
Sometimes love grows out of friendship. The attraction builds over time and then you come to realize that both of you are in over your heads, and you really don’t seem to care.
I call that gentle love. This is the kind that you want to nurture and caress like the water in a streambed running over the rock slowly dissolves the rock and two become one.
Other times love strikes like a bolt of lightning.
When that happens, you don’t know what to say. You don’t know how to act. You may not even be real sure if you’re still alive.
This is brutal love. It rips the soul right out of your body and holds it up for all the world to see.
There is another kind of love. It can either grow slowly over time, or strike quickly like lightning. Either way it makes no difference. For me, the outcome of this love was always the same, it always ended in heartbreak.
This love is the love between a man and a boy. This love is the love for forbidden fruit.
I know what it’s like to be in this kind of love. I’ve been there more than once. I want to tell you about the only time love that ever hit me like a bolt of lightning. It was one of the only times I was ever willing to give my heart unconditionally, with no strings attached. There are no words that can prepare you for love that strikes like a bolt of lightning.
There were no words that in any way prepared me for the heartbreak of being in love with forbidden fruit.
There are no words that I can think of that really describe the sorrow and grief of being willing to give your very soul to another, and knowing that it is forbidden to do so.
But if you’re willing and patient, I will try to describe how it was ....... back then ....... when I was a young man just discovering the world.
In order to really understand how I came to fall in love, you need to know something about me. So, where do I start, and what do I say that won't put everyone to sleep.
I was born in the first half of the 20th century, the youngest of four boys. It doesn't take a rocket scientist with a computer to figure out that puts my age in its second half century. If, in your opinion that makes me an ‘old man’, that’s your problem. Even though my family moved around quite a bit, and didn’t have ‘any’ money to speak of, I still thought that I had a pretty normal childhood. Of course, a man that's born blind thinks he's living a pretty full life until someone makes him really understand what sight is.
I was the only one in my family that actually graduated from High School. All my brothers left home as soon as they could. The oldest one left home and joined the merchant marine when he was 13 years old. I still have some post cards from all over the world he mailed back to our mother when he was 14 and 15. The other two left when they hit 16 ½, that was the youngest age that the Marine Corps would let you enlist. In the thirteen years I attended school, from Kindergarten through grade 12, I went to no less than eight different schools, in six different cities. I learned fast how to make friends and how to forget friends.
Somewhere along the way, at a fai rly early age, I figured out that I was different from other boys.
Now, you might ask yourself “how does a boy know he’s different”?
For one thing, to the best of my recollection, and I have a really good memory, I can never remember seeing my father. Not one single time. For another thing, I was smart. I learned to read at a very early age, and came equipped with a memory that most of my teachers termed ‘exceptional’. When I was eight years old I was reading structural engineering design books, and building truss girders out of Tinkertoys.
That was before I learned to hide it.
You see, the problem was that no one in my family knew what do with a borderline genius except to be very jealous. With a fairly good dose of sibling rivalry, my intelligence turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing, and I learned fairly early how to hide that intelligence behind a disguise of being dumb. I regret that today, because what I learned how to disguise was the creative part of my intelligence. People today say of me that I can understand some of the most incredibly complex devices (including the architecture of the microprocessor that makes this computer work), but I don’t have the vision to see past the end of my nose.
The other things that made me different, as I got older, were that I had a very un-boy like take-it or leave-it attitude about sports (I thought competitive games were really dumb), I didn't really care all that much for girls (I was very shy), and there were times when I was terribly lonely for adult male companionship.
Looking back on that time in my life today, it's a good thing (from my mothers point of view, not mine) I didn't run across a boylover when I was a pre-teen. If I had, and he had shown me just a little bit of attention, I would have become his 'loved boy' in an instant. Believe me, I would have done 'anything', and by that time I knew 'exactly' what 'anything' was, for two cents worth of love from an adult male.
When the fifties came to a close I started Jr. High school, and puberty, in that order. Thanks to some slightly diluted Native American genes, I was what was called a 'late bloomer'. I didn't get any pubic hair until I was almost 14, but the rest of the equipment was coming along quite well (eat your heart out guy's, you missed your chance:-). I had always had a casual attraction to boys, and never objected to being a part of a group of naked boys that were 'messing around'. Needless to say, it didn't take me too long in Jr. High school to figure out that my attraction to boys was a bit more than just ‘casual’. In fact, I really ‘liked’ looking at naked boys, and for that reason, and no other, I really did like gym. Unfortunately, the sixties were not exactly a favorite time for those attracted to others of the same sex.
During the years from 1955 to 1964, in the circles that my family moved in, the term 'gay' was not used to describe a person with homosexual tendencies. The term used to describe a person with homosexual tendencies was 'queer', spoken in the most vulgar and disgusting tone of voice possible. Nobody in my family was a queer. Queers were not welcome anywhere I lived, and the subject was 'not' a topic for conversation at any time. It was not allowed, and that was that. Period, end of discussion.
God forbid I should bring up the topic of my attraction for naked boy's in gym class. That would have given my grandmother (a devout Catholic) a stroke, sent my mother (also Catholic but divorced 3 times) off the deep end, and got me a whipping that would have been classed as a bit more 'robust' than normal.
Well, I had gotten pretty good by this time at hiding how smart I was, so I just as easily hid my attraction to boys and got on with my life. Everyone that noticed how little I had to do with girls just put it off on my being a 'late bloomer', and that was the end of the discussion.
By the time I got into high school my family situation had gone from bad to worse. I ended up finishing my junior and senior years in high school living with my old er brother and his wife, in San Diego, Ca. This was the early 60's, and San Diego was not a bad place to be if you didn’t have to work for a living. While it wasn't an unpleasant arrangement, I knew half way through my junior year I was gonna have to move out and start my own life as soon as I graduated. The draft was still in force then, Viet Nam was just over the horizon, so, much against my brothers wishes, I joined the Marines at the start of my last semester in high school, with the understanding that I would be allowed to finish the semester and graduate.
My lack of interest in sports did not do me much good in high school. I also found that I didn’t like looking at high school age boys nearly as much as I had enjoyed Jr. High. About this time I managed to convince myself that I had grown out of my “queer” phase and everything was going to be ‘Ok’. Of course I had a great deal of help in making this decision, because of a new term I picked up in high school. This new term really scared the living shit out of me, and made me stop and consider my attraction to other boys. It was called QUEER BASHING.
Remember I told you no one in my family was queer. Well, that didn’t mean there were no queers around. There were quite a few in Southern California, and one of the things that the players on the football team talked about every Monday was how may queer's they caught and beat the shit out of over the weekend. Needless to say, the atmosphere at school was not real friendly towards individuals that had a sexual preference that was not considered to be ‘normal’, and guess what that was.
I didn’t want anyone in school to get the impression I was even remotely queer. So I kept my mouth shut, my opinions to myself and learned how live with it. As I recall it wasn’t all that difficult a thing to do, but for a high school junior to have to live like that it sure got lonely.
I finished high school and went in Marines. Since getting out of the Corps, I have never let the fear of failure stop me from trying to do something I think is worth doing. Because of this, I have done almost everything I wanted to do, at least once, including some things that are considered questionable in the eyes of the law. There's only one thing I have always wanted to do and never did, and I am doing that now.
I never in my life ever thought I would find a group of people that I could tell this to and they would understand my attraction to boys.
To be continued
Techie
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